Jazz vocalist Claudia Acuna releases new album "Ave de Luz" rooted in Chile

Claudia Acuna, the Chilean vocalist, composer and bandleader who has lived in New York since 1995, released a new album called Ave de Luz on July 10 via Delfin Records. Where her earlier records ranged more broadly across Latin American traditions, Ave de Luz puts Chile squarely at the center, drawing on cueca, Mapuche traditions and instruments including the trutruca, kultrun and zampoña.

Acuna told UK Jazz News the idea had been with her since before she left Chile 30 years ago. "That thought has been there from the beginning, even before I took that plane 30 years ago and moved here," she said. Reaching this point in her career, she added, gave her the confidence to make the record fully hers: "I have become even more loyal and free to do things that maybe some years ago I was more shy about."

She pushes back against definitions of Latin jazz that assume clave or Brazilian rhythms. "Latin music is so much more than that," she said, describing Ave de Luz as a way to bring her Chilean roots fully into her music rather than touching on them at the edges, the way her earlier albums had.

The album gathers a cross-continental lineup: pianist and keyboardist Manu Koch, pianists Pablo Vergara and Andres Pollak, bassist Carlos Henderson, and drummer and percussionist Yayo Serka, alongside accordionist Pablo Zarate, multi-instrumentalist Fredy Torralba on charango and trutruca, and Chilean actress Paulina Garcia contributing a spoken-word part. Acuna co-produced the record with Pollak and recorded part of it in Santiago. "There are a lot of things that conceptually he understands, and I don't have to explain," she said of working with him.

The title track, written by Chilean folk master Mario Rojas, uses the cueca rhythm central to Chilean traditional music, while another song sets a poem by beloved Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral to music, with Garcia reciting it. Acuna described the trutruca, one of the record's signature instruments, as "almost like a trumpet or a trombone, but really long, long, long," traditionally used as a call to Mother Nature.

"Rezo," accompanied only by Torralba's charango, came out of a difficult moment: Acuna was recording it while wildfires burned through Patagonia and her own hometown, forcing her parents to nearly evacuate. "I didn't know what to do, and the only thing I could do was create a song," she said.

Acuna also pointed to "Chinga La Ka Chinga," a song that began as a joke around the phrase's overlap between Chilean and Mexican slang, set to a rhythm she compared to the carnival music of northern Chile's Fiesta de La Tirana, where her father once walked the equivalent of the distance from New York to Philadelphia as a religious promise for her brother. Underneath the humor, she said, the lyrics take aim at threats to education and women's rights, functioning as "a protest song without being too obvious about it."

Ave de Luz lands on the release calendar as one of the more personal records in Acuna's catalog within jazz and Latin music.